Well, shit. I totally forgot to do a Metal Monday post this past Monday, so to repent for my sin-rather than feeding my hands into meatgrinders so I can never type so much as another word again-I'll write about the ultimate current metal band, Blind Guardian, who deserve an unending amount of love and respect from the collective heavy metal community due to the fact that they make most metal bands look like pretentious posers who should hang up the whole being in a band thing and go back to working part-time shifts in their local record shop that makes two sales a week.
I'm going to indulge myself in my descriptions of how much I love this band right now, and why? Because I'm obviously a huge metal-nerd and Blind Guardian is a big ol' honking piece of decadent chocolate pie in the eyes of any unabashed metal nerd. Hell, I'd say that the band is the whole fucking pie without any slices taken out of it with whipped cream on top.If I had to make a list of my top 3 favorite metal bands, I would without question put Blind Guardian on that list without giving so much as a thought about it. Shit, here's the list:
- Judas Priest
- Opeth
- Blind Guardian
So, what is it about them that makes me so metallically horny? Yes, they're epic and employ heaping amounts of drama and bombast (as is evident by the song I posted above, a song so awesome that if you don't like it, you're stupid.) And yes, they bring on the triumphant riffs, dual lead harmonies and double bass drumming up the yin-yang, but I think that my love for the band mainly lies in their blatantly obvious integrity. Other than modern production techniques, there is not really anything modern about their overall sound, but the cool thing is, they absolutely do not sound like a throwback or retro-metal at all. It's not traditional heavy metal, and it's more than power metal and symphonic metal, it's just...metal, and the pure undistilled embodiment of the entire genre at that. If you want your metal with no pretense and all power, then Blind Guardian is the real fucking deal. When my uncle exposed me to the band for the first time when I was a kid it was love at first listen, and a love that's only gotten more intense and fervent over time to this very day. They've never made a slip-up in their 20-plus year career, and as I'm listening to their song "Follow the Blind" while I'm writing this, I honestly feel grateful to be living in a world where music like this exists within it. Ridiculous? A little bit, but I'm a nerd, so keep that in mind when judging my musical taste and my passion for it that is not unlike a wolverine on crack trying to kill a deer for dinner.
So, there you go. I'm borderline fanatical about Blind Guardian and I'm blessed by the metal gods to have their epicness in my life, and honestly, I can only imagine how deficient my little heavy metal world would be without their music to fill it with light and excitement. If you know me, you would know that I rarely, ever smile. But sometimes even something as simple as a great metal song can put a grin on my grim, ugly face.
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